Kadir Nelson

Born, 1974 in Washington, DC, USA

Kadir Nelson was one of the artists included in Black Romantic, subtitled The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art was an exhibition hosted by The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2002. Featuring some 30 artists, Black Romantic was described by Lowery Stokes Sims, the Studio Museum’s Director, as an exhibition in which “elements of desire, dreams, determination, and romance particular to the black experience present a viewpoint that is oppositional to modernist conceptualization of blackness flavoured by exogenous exoticism, stereotype, caricature, and even abstractionist manipulation.”

The exhibition was reviewed by James Trainor, for Frieze, Issue 69, September 2002. Trainor’s review was sensitive, considered and discussed the exhibition with great clarity. Amongst his concluding comments, “The Studio Museum in Harlem is in an uneviable position. On the one hand it represents a community and a culture, while on the other it is committed to presenting the foremost achievements of African-American artists to a wider world. The museum has been criticized by some in the black community, especialy in its own bavckyard, Harlem, for ignoring precisely this kind of art in favour of the highbrow avant-garde practices that will be accepted downtown. ‘Black Romantic’ seems to be an acknowledgement and a questioing of those criticisms, and deserves credit for raising the issue of which black artists are on the inside and which are on the outside, and why.”

Within the Black Romantic catalogue’s text is Strong Men Keep Comin’: Interview with Kadir Nelson, by Malik Gaines, illustrated with one of Nelson’s paintings. In the interview, Nelson states “Ernie Barnes was, besides my uncle, the first African-Amertican artist whose style I really liked and emulated. I think a lot people (sic) in my generation gravitated toward his work because it had a lot of emotion, it was just fun to look at…”